When Deleted Just Means Saved For Later

In an on-going court case, U.S. Magistrate Judge Elizabeth Laporte in San Francisco recently ruled that Google must produce all e-mails to include those deleted in order for the court to ascertain the whereabouts of a $300 million stash. A ruling of this nature creates a potential paradox for on-line services. In order to comply with potential law enforcement and legal actions, will public and private e-mail systems be required to save all electronic transactions in perpetuity? If so, this will create massive demands for system capacity for the service provider.

Furthermore, it creates a disturbing lack of privacy for end users. Google's current privacy policy states, 'Residual copies of deleted messages and accounts may take up to 60 days to be deleted from our active servers and may remain in our offline backup systems.' This already leaves a lot of wiggle room by which users may assume their messages have not been destroyed. Perhaps wary users should begin taking an increased interest in strong encryption.

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